22
What Future for Festivals?
“NATIVE CHRISTMAS” HOW FESTIVALS CAN LEAD TO CULTURAL RESURGENCE By: Jason Ryle
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE IMAGINENATIVE FILM AND MEDIA ARTS FESTIVAL IN CANADA ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FESTIVAL IN EXPANDING AUTHENTIC REPRESENTATIONS OF FIRST NATIONS PEOPLE It was at an academic conference on Indigenous Futurisms at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in November 2017 where I had a profound cultural experience. By this point I had been entrenched in the Indigenous media arts sector for over a decade as the executive director of the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival. It bears mentioning, however briefly, the legacy of cultural displacement that many First Nations people in Canada endure due to European colonization of our nations. My mother’s first language is Anishinaabemowin, but it is a language whose beauty and embedded cultural knowledge was not passed on to me. My mother was one of tens of thousands of Indigenous children forcibly removed from their families and cultures by the Canadian government and placed in church-run residential schools. She was six years old when she was taken. Eradication of Indigenous cultures was the goal and children were beaten for speaking their languages. This active assimilationist practise – not widely known in Canada until recent years – has been acknowledged as a cultural genocide by the United Nations and was brutally effective in fracturing sovereign nations and causing deep traumas in generations of Indigenous families. Part of my inheritance was a disconnection not just from my ancestral language, but also a childhood growing up with deeply harmful portrayals of Indigenous peoples on screen. Hollywood really did a number on us. News reportages were often racist. The Natives I saw on screen were nothing like me or the people I loved. Indigenous children grow up with an acute understanding of authentic representation and how to navigate global stereotypes of who we are. This is why imagineNATIVE was founded. Since its first Festival in 2000, imagineNATIVE has been mandated to support Indigenous artists working in screen-based media and to promote Indigenous narrative sovereignty in screen storytelling. Indigenous-made cinema has long been a counter cinema to over a century of films created by non-Indigenous people, which helped establish a persistent global stereotype of who we are. The Festival’s first years were lean. Given our strict mandate to only show films whose creative lead was Indigenous, the number of eligible films was small. But the Festival and the Indigenous
